Author: Llewella Chapman

Veronica Johnson, National University of Ireland, Galway

22 May 2019

I’m writing this blog while sitting in the archive that I’m about to describe. It’s a beautiful early spring day. To the right and in front of me I can see vast swathes of daffodils through the floor to ceiling windows that occupy two sides of the Special Collections Reading Room where all archives and special collections material are examined. It’s quite here today, just two other manuscript researchers and three online researchers.

I first came here in February 2017 when I was lucky enough to receive a Moore Institute fellowship https://mooreinstitute.ie/ which funds up to one month in this archive. This fellowship also provides a desk in the Hardiman research building and access to the main Hardiman library. I came to examine the Shield’s Family Archive and the Abbey Theatre Archive as part of my research into the Film Company of Ireland (1916-1920). I was interested in the relationship between this first significant Irish fiction film company and the Abbey Theatre as the owners of the Film Company of Ireland hired most of their actors and directors from the Abbey Theatre. Very little is known about this area, so I was delighted to have access to two archives that might shed some light on the interactions between the theatre and the film company.

The Shield’s Family Archive relates mostly to the actor Arthur Shields, who began his career in the Abbey Theatre and then had a long career in film and television in America. He is best known for his work with John Ford, playing the protestant minister in The Quiet Man (1952) when his more well-known brother William Joseph Shields (Barry Fitzgerald) played the matchmaker. One of the first Abbey Theatre actors that the Film Company of Ireland recruited was J. M. Kerrigan. Kerrigan was well-known as a versatile, comic character actor in the Abbey. He was in charge of training young actors and in this capacity, he became a mentor for Arthur Shields when he joined the Abbey in 1914. Kerrigan directed the first films for the Film Company of Ireland in 1916 and 1917 as well as acting in them. He was also one of the first people to invest in the company and seems to have acted as a casting director for the company also. I had hoped to find out more information about J. M. Kerrigan from the Shields archive and it did not disappoint. The friendship between these two men began when Shields joined the Abbey in 1914 and lasted until Kerrigan’s death in 1964. Of particular help in this archive were letters from Shields and Kerrigan, clippings of newspaper interviews and drafts of a biography of Arthur Shields by his wife Laurie Shields. This archive gave a context to the acting methods of the Abbey Theatre at that time, methods which were greatly influenced by Kerrigan in his role as tutor. As none of the films by J. M. Kerrigan for the Film Company of Ireland are known to have survived, it was useful to examine accounts of the acting methods he used in theatre and to compare this to press reviews of the films which he directed.

J. M. Kerrigan. Shields Family Archive. T13/B/269. National University of Ireland, Galway

I then turned to the second archive I examined in this period, the archive of the Abbey Theatre itself, digitised and available to search in the Special Collections reading room. This is a large archive containing programmes, minutes of meetings, photography of actors, sets and plays, scripts, administrative and production files. This archive proved very useful in tracing the careers of J. M. Kerrigan and also Fred O’Donovan, the second major actor recruited from the Abbey. O’Donovan was a leading actor at the Abbey who also directed plays there and who subsequently went on to manage the theatre. By examining theatre programmes and minutes of meetings in this archive I was able to trace the movement of Kerrigan and O’Donovan between their stage acting and their film acting.

The archive and special collections of the National University of Ireland, Galway opens from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday with late opening until 9pm on Tuesdays during term time. The holdings of the archive can be examined at http://archivesearch.library.nuigalway.ie/. Booking is not required, although it is a good idea to get in touch with the archive in advance of your visit so that the materials you want will be available when you arrive. Document retrieval times are 10:00, 12:00 and 15:00. A registration form is required before accessing the archive and a Register must be signed on each entry into the Special Collections Reading Room. There are lockers for personal possessions, only pencils and laptops are permitted for notetaking. Permission must be requested before photographing or photocopying items. The staff are excellent, incredibly knowledgeable about the holdings and extremely pleasant and helpful. They do everything they can to make accessing the archives and consulting them pleasant and easy. As it is situated in the National University of Ireland, Galway, the archive is close to a number of restaurants and coffee shops on campus. The university itself is located about 15 minutes from the centre of Galway city where there is a variety of places to eat and sleep. In addition to the archives mentioned above, there are a number of other archives related to film and media history. These include the Huston Family Collection, an archive of scripts and production material and legal documents from the films of John Huston, mostly relating to his final film The Dead, the Éamon de Buitléar Collection, a collection of video, audio and manuscripts from the wildlife broadcaster and film-maker, the Diaries of Joseph Holloway (1895-1944), a regular attendee of theatre and cinema in Dublin, an invaluable source of information about the entertainment scene in Dublin during this period, and the Killanin Collection of books on film, literature and art from Michael Morris, 3rd Baron Killanin, film producer.

Galway is a warm, welcoming, compact and lively city with a good arts scene. Any trip to the archives at the National University of Ireland, Galway will be complemented by all that the city has to offer, not to mention the beauties of the Burren and Connemara close by. If you do make the journey, come over and say hello, I’ll be sitting close to one of the many windows knee-deep in all the archive has to offer on early Irish cinema and film.

Veronica Johnson teaches film studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research focuses on the Film Company of Ireland (1916-1920), early cinema and the cinematic unconscious. A recent attendee at the IAMHIST masterclass, her article “Dublin cinemas in 1916 and the growth of the middle-class audience” is forthcoming from the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

Llewella Chapman, University of East Anglia

7 May 2019

I attended this event with great anticipation, and I was most definitely not disappointed. The symposium was organised by Sadie Wearing (London School of Economics), who is part of the team working on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project ‘Jill Craigie: Film Pioneer’, alongside Yvonne Tasker (University of Leeds), Lizzie Thynne (University of Sussex) and Adele Tulli (University of Sussex).

The three-year project, which began in October 2018, is researching the documentary filmmaker Jill Craigie as an entry point to ‘interrogate the historical frameworks and the canon of the British Documentary Film Movement which have undervalued women’s contribution to the genre.’ As part of this, the project makes use of primary sources held by archives, predominantly Craigie’s papers held by the Women’s Library at the LSE, as well as holdings available in the British Film Institute (BFI), the British Entertainment History Project (BEHP, formally BECTU), The Arts Institute (Plymouth), The Forum (Norwich) and the Stanley Spencer Gallery. The main aim of the project is to question ‘what we can learn from a pioneering woman’s career about the inequalities which persist in the creative industries today.’ You can visit here for more information.

Most pleasing on attending the symposium was discovering that not only were there a range of papers and methodological approaches offered toward the researching of women documentary filmmakers during this period, but most importantly, the research was being conducted by a range of scholars and archivists at different levels, from PhD students to professors. All of the papers were of a consistently high quality. Alongside this, it quickly became evident that everyone attending the symposium was fully engaged with one another’s scholarship, and the symposium provided a very supportive environment in which to provide further platforms for future collaboration and research.

Fiona Kelly, Film Curator at the Imperial War Museums (IWM), began the day by introducing films by and about women during World War II held by the archive, including documentaries, informational and instructional films made by Joy Batchelor, Louise Birt, Jill Craigie, Mary Field, Ruby Grierson, Kay Mander and Margaret Thomson. In her paper, Kelly considered three main strands: firstly, the role of women behind the camera; secondly, how women were represented on screen; finally, the target audience, where Kelly noted that before female conscription, film shorts were aimed at women in their ‘traditional’ roles and domestic issues, however as the war progressed, the documentaries and dramas adapted to inform women about the different types of work and war service available to them. Kelly informed the audience of the films held by the IWM, and two Ruby Grierson films are available to view on its website: Choose Cheese (1940) and They Also Serve (1942). Another film shown was Dustbin Parade (1940), an animation short by John Halas and Joy Batchelor for the Ministry of Information (MoI):

Dustbin Parade (Halas and Batchelor, 1942)

Following Kelly’s excellent introduction, the first panel of the day continued with Toby Haggith (IWM) explaining that the majority of documentary and instructional films made by women were often concerned with ‘traditional’ issues such as welfare, health, children and the domestic sphere. Haggith went on to focus his paper on the women filmmakers’ contribution to debates on slum clearance and town planning, including Field’s Development of the English Town (1943), Mander’s New Builders (1944) and Homes for the People (1945), Budge Cooper’s Children of the City (1945), and Craigie’s The Way We Live (1946).

This was followed by Charlotte Hallahan’s (University of East Anglia) compelling research conducted into Rosie Newman, a British socialite and amateur filmmaker, and provided an insight into how Newman recorded daily civilian and military life during World War II. The focus of Hallahan’s paper was on Newman’s colour film Britain at War (1946):

Excerpt from Britain at War (Rosie Newman, 1946), courtesy of IWM

Hallahan argued that the theory of the flâneur (Walter Benjamin, developed by Lauren Elkin) can be adopted and used to analyse Newman’s film in relation to her ability to traverse the landscape of a blitzed-London at will, and personal freedom with which to document the events. It became clear during Hallahan’s excellent paper that Newman’s ability to achieve this was in part due to her socio-economic class, where Newman had a ‘little black book’ of people with which to acquire colour film stock, etc.

The final paper in this panel was delivered by Hollie Price (Queen Mary, University of London), who drew upon her extensive and fascinating archival research in to the MoI’s Film Division and its work in film distribution to present on the MoI’s non-theatrical film scheme, launched in 1940, where a fleet of mobile film units were used to screen films for free in a variety of locations including village halls, social clubs, libraries and factory canteens. Price also discussed the informal collaborations between the MoI and the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Women’s Institute. Price is working as a post-doctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded MoI Digital project, which you can read more about here.

After lunch, the second panel began with Sarah Easen (independent film historian) discussing how film historians often conflate John Grierson’s British Documentary Film Movement with documentary filmmakers generally, leading to the marginalisation of those operating outside the movement. Therefore, Easen sought to address this in her engrossing paper by focussing on the work of Mander and Thomson, including showing Thomson’s informational film Making of a Compost Heap (1941):

Making of a Compost Heap (Margaret Thomson, 1941), courtesy of BFI

Easen explained that while both Mander and Thomson achieved success in directing documentary films, neither were able to break into directing fictional feature films, with Mander returning to continuity work after being told by Michael Balcon of Ealing Studios that a woman ‘couldn’t control a male crew,’ and Thomson retiring from filmmaking in 1977 after setting up a production company in the 1950s with her husband Bill Ash. Easen provides further information on Mander’s and Thomson’s careers here and here.

Next, Helen Hughes (University of Surrey) presented on her research completed to date on ‘tracking down’ Diana Pine, a member of the Crown Film Unit between 1943 – 1951, who worked on the science films Faster than Sound (1949) and Atoms at Work (1952). Explaining that Pine was another women filmmaker whose work has been ‘hidden from view’ (in part due to Pine having to sign the Official Secrets Act), Hughes explained that Pine is an important inclusion in the work being conducted into British women documentary filmmakers due to her directing of science-based films as opposed to ‘traditional’ women-based subjects. Hughes has published her research on Pine to date in her research note ‘The story of Atoms at Work’ in Screen (Vol. 60, Issue: 1, Spring 2019, pp. 172-180).

Charles Drazin (Queen Mary, University of London) completed the panel by providing further insight into Craigie’s work through discussing his interview with Craigie as part of his research for his book The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (revised edition, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). Drazin provided delegates with ‘impressions’ he obtained of Craigie from his interview, and specifically focussed on her directing of Out of Chaos (1944) and The Way We Live. Drazin also provided the context behind Craigie’s professional relationship with Filippo Del Giudice. You can listen to one of Craigie’s interviews published on the BEHP website here.

In the final panel of the day, Ros Cranston (BFI) started by examining the career of Marion Grierson in order to question modify the story of the ‘documentary boys’ in British film history, explaining that this was in part because of academic scholarship overlooking Marion’s work, and can also be attributed to the lack of credits at the time, leading to later mistakes through mis-crediting or omitting Marion in contemporary film reviews: a specific example being The Heart of an Empire (1935). Focussing on Beside the Seaside (1935), Cranston analysed this film in terms of its wittiness, lyricism and inventiveness, and explained that Marion believed: “There was of course prejudice against women in practically every activity,” in relation to the difference it made being a woman making a documentary, neatly linking back to Easen’s paper on Mander and Thomson in the previous panel.

Gillian Murphy (Curator, LSE Women’s Library) followed by building on from Drazin’s paper through an excellent analysis of Craigie and the rich resource of papers available which are held by the LSE Women’s Library. Murphy’s paper offered an illuminating insight into Craigie’s feminist politics, and her inspiration behind wanting make a film about the suffragette movement based on her reading of The Suffragette Movement (Sylvia Pankhurst, 1931):

Before reading the book it had not occurred to me to question the situation between the sexes, least of all had I thought that it might be changed, though it was evident that men on he whole lived a far more agreeable and interesting life. (Jill Craigie, quoted by Gillian Murphy)

In the event, the film sadly remained unrealised, in part due to not being able to satisfy the needs of those involved in the movement. Following this, Murphy analysed the making of To Be A Woman (1952), and how Craigie was commissioned to make the film by women’s organisations actively campaigning in achieving equal pay. A crowd-funding campaign was launched by the Equal Pay Campaign Committee (EPCC) to provide the £5,000 necessary for Craigie to make the film was eventually successful, the realised film did not return the investment.

To Be A Woman (Jill Craigie, 1952)

Tashi Petter (Queen Mary, University of London) offered a riveting paper on the work of Lotte Reiniger, and explained that while Reiniger is credited for the silhouette animation technique and as the director of the earliest-surviving animated feature-length film The Adventures of Prince Ahmed (1926), therefore holding an important position in the history of animation, Reiniger’s work in the area of ‘useful’ cinema has received less attention, something which Petter aims to address in her research.

Making extensive use of archive sources, Petter explored questions of gender and nationality, and focussed on the commissioning of Reiniger’s work produced for the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit and Crown Film Unit. Petter explained that Reiniger’s work was heavily influenced by folklore narratives and fairy tales, leading to a ‘highly decorative, pretty and “feminine” aesthetic’. In her paper, Petter argued that these films demonstrate how Reiniger’s silhouettes are ‘inherently connected to her identity as a German émegré, and for her recognition in the production of ‘useful’ cinema, and analysed The Tocher (1938) as part of this:

The Tocher (Lotte Reiniger, 1938), courtesy of Thomas Sheppard

Finally, Melanie Williams (University of East Anglia) provided a very welcome introduction to amateur women filmmakers in the interwar and post-war period, particularly on non-fiction films, a term which encompasses different modes, including documentary, actuality, home movies and travelogues, building upon Hallahan’s analysis of Newman’s amateur filmmaking practices. Williams’ offered a close analysis of the husband-and-wife filmmaking team of Stuart and Laurie Day who were based in Stoke on Trent, and together produced non-fiction films between the 1930s and 1960s, where their prize-winning films form part of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC) film collection held by the East Anglian Film Archive. Williams’ paper investigated how amateur filmmaking tended to be much more collaborative, which were strongly embedded within marital and familial leisure-cultures, as exemplified by the Day’s film, 1938 – The Last Year of Peace (1948), compiled from fragments of film shot before the outbreak of WWII, which only received ‘highly commended’ in the IAC Awards much to Laurie Day’s displeasure. As part of this analysis, Williams also pointed out the Day’s somewhat amusing, apparently subconscious, almost Freudian obsession with fruit throughout the film, which was used by the Day’s to reflect the changing of the seasons in the film. Williams’ explained that this example highlights that this type of amateur film can offer reflection and commentary on social change and offers ‘a richly suggestive point of comparison for the contemporaneous work of professional female documentarists.’

Following the final panel, the project team working on ‘Jill Craigie: Film Pioneer’ explained their planned outputs for the project, namely a book-length study co-authored by Tasker and Wearing, and a experimental documentary biopic about Craigie, produced by Thynne and Tulli. Delegates were then offered a treat, where the team introduced us to an 8-minute trailer for the documentary on Craigie.

In the plenary-round table to finish off the day, Isabel Seguí (University of St Andrews) introduced delegates to her website which Seguí designed based on a Scottish University University Research Collections Associate Scheme Grant, where she researched the project ‘The Grierson Sisters at the Grierson Collection’ (University of Stirling, 2018). This website will prove to be an invaluable teaching and research resource for those working in the area of documentary filmmaking.

Isabella Seguí, courtesy of Lizzie Thynne

Pat Holland (University of Bournemouth) and Sue Harper (University of Portsmouth) then offered their individual summaries on the variety of papers presented throughout the day, and their thoughts on going forward to research the history of women documentary filmmakers. Harper offered the following points for further thought beyond the symposium:

Agency and autonomy. To what extent did companies inhibit or encourage female creativity, and why?

Kinship networks. There are obviously familial or marriage connections to take into account, but we also need to ask ourselves whether, and when, there were “old girls’ networks”

Do female documentarists operate as boundary walkers, policing the ground between the old and the new? Do they function best from the margins?

We need to think about discourse. What cultural resources do female documentarists deploy, and how does their intellectual capital differ from that of male workers in the field?

This event was free to attend, thanks to the sponsorship provided by the AHRC, and provided an abundance of the riches (or should that be cheese and fruit?) to enjoy from the research conducted by those presenting papers on women documentary filmmakers. Watch out John: Diana, Joy, Kay, Lisa, Lotte, Margaret, Marion, Mary, Rosie and Ruby are coming, and their voices are now finally being heard.

Dr Llewella Chapman is a film historian and an Associate Tutor at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests include British cinema, gender, heritage and costume design.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

Erin Wiegand, Northumbria University

3 April 2019

This February, I had the pleasure of visiting the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. I was there to conduct research within a single collection the library holds: the Samuel Z. Arkoff papers. Donated to the library in 2008 by Arkoff’s children, Donna Roth and Lou Arkoff, the collection contains over a hundred boxes of archival materials primarily relating to Arkoff’s work as a film producer.

Arkoff is best known as the cofounder of American International Pictures, an independent studio which he acted as producer for, and later president of, from 1954–1980. American International Pictures became successful producing and distributing low-budget, quickly made films packaged as double bills, particularly for drive-in circuits, and specialized in science fiction, horror, biker, and other genre films. Above all else, AIP became synonymous with the newly identified ‘teen market’, which they aggressively targeted in both marketing campaigns and the teen-oriented content of the films themselves. In the 1960s, AIP pioneered the ‘beach party’ genre, anchored by stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, while also finding success with horror fans in the ‘Poe cycle’, a series of films directed by Roger Corman that adapted (often very loosely) the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Arkoff and AIP also launched the careers of many now-famous actors and directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, and Martin Scorsese.

The archive contains a wealth of information on AIP and Arkoff’s career, including a huge collection of pressbooks, film stills and photographs, lobby cards and posters, and continuity scripts, as well as financial materials, release schedules, contracts, correspondence, and publicity materials for a wide range of films, from How to Stuff a Wild Bikini to The Amityville Horror. Multiple boxes also contain Arkoff’s personal correspondence, speeches and interviews, press clippings, and materials relating to his charitable work. A full eight boxes of the archive document the production details of Arkoff’s unreleased film Nightcrawler (which he had worked on for years after leaving AIP in 1980 and establishing his own production company), including contracts, scripts, and financial documents; another box contains details of Arkoff’s plans to remake AIP’s hit film I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) in the early 1990s. In short, the collection is pure gold for anyone interested in Arkoff himself or in the workings of AIP, as it provides an incredible variety of materials.

But it’s also a great resource for anyone researching American exploitation and B-films of the 1950s–1970s—like I am. What led me to the archive was not an interest in Arkoff or AIP specifically, but rather the fact that it was a rare source for publicly accessible archival materials of any kind relating to exploitation films. Film historians investigating exploitation films have particular challenges when it comes to archives, for several reasons: first, the producers and distributors responsible for these films generally regarded them as disposable, uninteresting beyond their ability to make money quickly, and relatively interchangeable with one another. Unlike major studios and prestige production outfits, it would have been unusual for anyone to have kept any records such as production notes, correspondence, budgets, and the like, and such documents are extremely hard to find for exploitation films. Additionally, what materials do exist have typically not been considered a priority by most archives, given the low cultural status and poor quality of exploitation films (and the relative lack of interest in researching them). Thus, to find an archive housing something as large and detailed as the Arkoff collection is a real treat!

My own research project is concerned with the relationship between exploitation films and conceptions of documentary sobriety, veracity, and education, examining a wide range of exploitation films that employed a documentary mode and highlighted this aspect in their marketing. Since I’m particularly interested in this latter aspect, the Arkoff collection’s abundant assortment of pressbooks was a big draw for me. After reviewing the collection catalog, I was able to identify about twenty films on my list that I had not yet found pressbooks or marketing materials for, including Mondo Teeno, Ecco, Africa Uncensored, Witchcraft 70, Kama Sutra, and Helga. In addition to pressbooks and posters, I also found a few interesting bits of correspondence, including a telegram from an Oklahoma City drive-in exhibitor to exploitation producer Bob Cresse congratulating him on the ‘sensational’ success of his film Ecco (a re-edit of two Italian ‘mondo movies’), which Cresse had worked with AIP to distribute. Additionally, a letter and press campaign sent by AIP to exhibitors for its film Helga (a German sex-education film repackaged as exploitation fare) provided some fascinating insights into promotional strategies around the film, which (contrary to what I’d expected) AIP suggested would benefit from heavy targeting of ‘women’s audiences’, such as buying ad spots during daytime soap operas and game shows. Taken together, the material I collected from the archive in just one day was enormously invigorating to my research and absolutely worth the trip.

The special collections reading room is small but comfortable, and I was the only researcher there for the entire day. Lockers are available just outside the room for storing personal belongings—the only things allowed inside the reading room are laptops, phones, notepaper, and pencils. The archive does allow photographs for personal use, so the bulk of my time was spent taking photos with my phone (using the CamScanner app) to review in more detail later.

The library itself is located on the Loyola Marymount University campus in Los Angeles, close to the Los Angeles International Airport. While I did see a few campus shuttles running, I would advise those considering a visit that public transportation may be tricky for visiting this archive; I had rented a car, and easily found parking in a campus lot near the library ($12.50 for a full day). Other tips for visiting researchers: while I packed my own lunch to eat on the patio outside, there is a Starbucks adjacent to the library and a number of food options in the Lair Marketplace in the Malone Building, about a five-minute walk away.

While I spent my day working entirely within the Arkoff collection, Cynthia Becht, head of archives and special collections at the library, suggested that film scholars might also be interested in their largest film history collection, the Arthur P Jacobs collection. Jacobs, initially a PR agent for stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Warren Beatty, and Gregory Peck, was also the producer of the original Planet of the Apes series, and the archive contains a treasure trove of materials on these films: multiple screenplay drafts, storyboards, production notes and correspondence, publicity materials, and more.

A final note to fellow exploitation-film researchers: if visiting LA, it is also worth a trip to the Margaret Herrick Library, where I also found a handful of interesting bits of correspondence, draft scripts, and notes brainstorming ideas for advertising slogans for a few films on my list. Of interest as well is the Dan Sonney collection at the UCLA Film and Television Archive (write to the archive for a PDF catalog), although unfortunately most of the films it contains are not in viewable condition. (However, researchers can make special requests in the case of a film essential to their study, though assume at least six months between the request and an appointment, given the complex and delicate work involved.)

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Cynthia Becht, Lauren Longwell, and the student staff at the William H Hannon Library for all their assistance!

Erin Wiegand is a postgraduate researcher at Northumbria University, where she is completing her doctoral dissertation on exploitation documentary films. She is also the web editor of the JCMS Teaching Dossier and a programming volunteer at the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle upon Tyne. For more about her work and publications, visit http://erinewiegand.com or follow her @erinewiegand on Twitter.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.